Sunday, January 31, 2016

As Chris Morley notes in a series of comments here yesterday (this is his initial comment in the thread), a story has made the rounds this weekend about the new policy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints recently enacted punishing the children of same-sex couples (previous commentary on this story is here, here, and here). On 28th January, the Salt Lake Tribunepublished a report citing data from the group Mama Dragons, Mormon mothers supporting their gay children, which indicates that there have been 32 suicides of young LGBT Mormons following the church's adoption of its new gay-excluding policy.

This has been a lively several days of discussion at Bilgrimage (133 comments and counting now, on my previous posting about Cardinal Burke and his emangelization initiative!), and I confess I'm having a bit of trouble catching up with comments. I cherish all of your remarks. I may not have time to acknowledge each of them individually, however.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

As Marianne Duddy-Burke of Dignity-USA says in response to Pope Francis's recent public statement opposing marriage equality in Italy, what Francis appears to be attempting is to open a more pastorally affirming space for LGBT people in the Catholic church while continuing to uphold the (very recent) magisterial teaching that LGBT people are "essentially disordered." As she also maintains, you can't have it both ways: you can't claim to be welcoming and affirming while you promote teachings that make a set of fellow human beings less human than everyone else in the world, and while you argue on the basis of those teachings that these denigrated fellow human beings should enjoy fewer rights than other human beings enjoy.

I'll admit to you all a frustration bordering on peevishness at the way many people in religious circles seem inclined to turn plain truth on its head as they parse the lives and fates of fellow human beings who are LGBT. The classic formulation of this truth inversion: "I'm not homophobic. I love gay folks. I just want to speak the truth to them in love as I tell them they are under God's judgment, are headed to hell if they do not repent, and cannot have the same rights other people have -- because love."

Friday, January 22, 2016

A footnote about what I posted earlier today regarding the documents just made public by St. John's Benedictine Abbey in Minnesota, re: monks credibly accused of having abused minors: as happens so often in the toxic, homophobic context of American Catholicism when stories about sexual abuse by Catholic clergy are made public, a string of people have already logged into the thread discussing Brian Roewe's story to sling around the usual accusations about homosexuals abusing boys. Check out the thread started by Marty Eble's comment setting that line of discussion rolling.

Does anyone but me ever have the sense that Catholic pastoral authorities have played and continue playing an ugly game with the rest of us about the abuse situation in the Catholic church? (I'm being facetious, of course: we all know that they've long been playing games with us about this.)

In a powerful statement at National Catholic Reporter today, Jamie Manson notes that many Catholics would like to hope that the door of mercy they think Pope Francis is opening in the church has a "connecting corridor" to a door of justice for LGBT people. She reports that many of her well-meaning heterosexual friends encourage her to hope that Francis's appeal to mercy will some way, somehow, lead to a decision on the part of the Catholic church to treat LGBT human beings with justice, as well — though (as she also points out) the pope was utterly silent on his recent trip to Africa about draconian laws targeting LGBT people in some African nations. And as she also points out, LGBT people are still being ceaselessly fired by Catholic institutions.

I've just finished reading the new book by the noted French Dominican Thomist scholar Reverend Adriano Oliva, Amours: L'Église, les divorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels(Paris: Cerf, 2015), and would like to offer you today some notes about this important new study. Oliva is a distinguished student of the very important Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, on whose understanding of natural law much Catholic theology has been built over the centuries. He is president of the Leonine Commission, the group charged with producing and publishing faithful critical editions of Aquinas's work, and is a research fellow at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, and a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), both in Paris.

Really, who needs fusty old Walt Whitman any longer, when we have Ms. Palin creating her brilliant word-salad paeans to the American common man and common woman? It's poetry, I tell you! It's poetry, the speech that Ms. Palin gave yesterday in support of that monumental champion of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Six Packs, and Mr. Whitman's work can't hold a candle to it:

Saturday, January 16, 2016

I've shared these observations with you in the past. I think it might be helpful now to gather them together in one posting, following the recent decision of Primates 2016 to discipline the Episcopal Church USA for its full embrace of LGBT human beings as children of God equal to other children of God. These are three incisive statements by a member of Oxford's Faculty of Theology and Religion, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch. MacCulloch grew up in the household of an Anglican parson. He also happens to be openly gay.

Thinking back this morning to Kaya Oakes's post-Obergefell essay last November: as she points out, anti-LGBT right-wing Christians have really lost the battle to exclude LGBT people from the circle of humanity and the church. But the more they recognize the futility of continuing this losing battle, the angrier — and more exclusionary — they become.

Friday, January 15, 2016

Alexander Stille in The New Yorker yesterday, commenting on the disclosure by a German lawyer that 231 boys were abused in the Regensburg cathedral choir over several decades, with beatings, food deprivation, and rape — a choir directed by Pope Benedict XVI's brother Georg Ratzinger from 1964 to 1994:

As Chris Morley has reported to us in several comments, at its Primates 2016 meeting in Canterbury, the Anglican Communion chose yesterday to sanction the Episcopal Church USA for supporting same-sex marriage. For Episcopal News Service, Matthew Davies reports what the presiding bishop of ECUSA, Michael Curry, told his fellow bishops as they moved towards sanctioning ECUSA for supporting LGBT people and their rights:

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

As Frederick Clarkson points out in a just-published (and exhaustive and richly-resourced) must-read overview of the religious liberty battles facing us in the U.S. today, the "I believe it, so it must be right" "religious freedom" argument that the Little Sisters of the Poor and the U.S. Catholic bishops want to shove in the face of the American public through the sisters' lawsuit against the Obama administration builds on the claim that the Supreme Court allowed to prevail in the Hobby Lobby lawsuit of 2014. As I noted in my previous posting today, the Little Sisters of the Poor object even to signing paperwork exempting them from responsibility for providing contraceptive coverage to their employees, with the claim that they believe that certain contraceptives are abortifacients, no matter what sound scientific evidence says about these contraceptives.

And so last evening, both the Little Sisters of the Poor and Kim Davis were invited by Republican officials* to the State of the Union address. Interestingly enough, the leading Catholic "liberal" publication National Catholic Reporter chose yesterday to highlight the presence of the Little Sisters of the Poor at this event with not one, but two, articles, one a Catholic News Service report indicating that the U.S. Catholic bishops have filed an amicus brief on behalf of the group of nuns in their battle with the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate, the other an article by reporter Dawn Araujo-Hawkins providing yet more rather glowing publicity for the Little Sisters of the Poor's challenge to the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

As a new year gets underway, I feel moved to make a statement of heartfelt thanks here — thanks to my husband Steve, who makes it possible for me to blog (and read and write) by assuming the responsibility of being the primary breadwinner of our household. As some of you know (but you may not all know this), I don't have a full-time job, while Steve does.

Several days ago, I took note of Wheaton College's firing of its controversial tenured theology professor, Dr. Larycia Hawkins. Many of you will know that Dr. Hawkins teaches political science at Wheaton, the "Harvard of evangelicalism," and ran afoul of the college's administrators when she chose to wear a hijab (as an evangelical Christian) to protest the targeting of all Islamic Americans as terrorists. The ostensible reason Wheaton has given for moving against her is that this gesture and statements she made about it contravene the college's statement of faith by implying that the God worshipped by evangelical Christians is the same God worshipped as Allah by Muslims.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

I know some Bilgrimage readers have been following (and participating in) the mind-blowing discussion of Gil Caldwell's Religion News Service article at National Catholic Reporter in the past several days, because I can see your contributions in the discussion thread. For those who don't know what this discussion is about: Reverend Gilbert H. Caldwell is a United Methodist minister with a long, admirable history of advocating for equal rights for people of color within the United States and in the church in which he's ordained. His book Something Within recounts his life story, his days of marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights movement, his years of work for racial justice and reconciliation in both the culture at large and the Christian churches. (I've blogged about Gil Caldwell's work in the past: click his name in the labels below for my previous postings about him.)

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Yesterday, LGBT News Italiapublished an interview with the former Vatican official Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, who made a public announcement that he is gay and partnered last October, and who was then removed from his position in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Here are some excerpts:

Several days ago, when I took note of National Catholic Reporter columnist Michael Sean Winters' soft selling of a statement by Cardinal Donald Wuerl defending the firing of LGBT employees of Catholic institutions who contravene magisterial norms, I zeroed in on the glaring gap between Catholic leaders' entirely rhetorical statements about "welcoming" LGBT people, and how those same leaders actually treat LGBT people. I wrote,

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Religious freedom (as in, "If I believe it hard and sincerely enough, I have the right to deny rights to you: because my God tells me so!") remains in the news as 2016 begins, and in all likelihood, will continue to be in the news this year, especially as the election cycle heats up:

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

In an essay published yesterday by National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winters quotes approvingly a statement by Washington, D.C. Cardinal Wuerl on his blog defending the firing of LGBT employees of Catholic institutions who marry a same-sex partner, but claiming that the Catholic church "welcomes" "everybody," LGBT people included.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Yesterday, I wrote about how one of the fascinating aspects of the way in which non-mainstream sources, at least, are reporting about the occupation of a federal building in Oregon by a ragtag band of white supremacists, Islamophobes, and right-wing Mormons is that — in contrast to the coverage of the Bundy standoff in 2014 — these sources are taking note of the right-wing Mormon connections of the Bundy family. I find this development heartening, for two reasons.

The synchonicity of conversations on the worldwide web never fails to intrigue me — discourse community linking to discourse community when they're to all appearances not connected at all. As Mary Q pointed out in a comment here two days ago, at the same time (roughly) that I was having a conversation with Chris Morley here about the peculiar pathology of the Roman Catholic clerical system, which intermixes hypocrisy (especially about matters sexual involving the clergy) with power and the abuse of power, with the ravening desire of career clerics to be at the top of an ecclesiastical ladder in which being on top means using, hurting, throwing away a lot of folks at the bottom, a reader of Jennifer Haselberger's blog was leaving a comment there very similar to my statements to Chris.

It's interesting, isn't it, that immediately after the right-wing Opus Dei Catholic Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia informed a group of Catholic high school students in Metairie, Louisiana, that we need more religion in the federal government, an armed rebellion breaks out in the state of Oregon? With religion as one of its roots . . . . And with that very same federal government that should, Scalia thinks, bow to religion in the sights of this rebellion . . . .

I have to admit that I raised my eyebrows a few weeks ago when the New York Times published Norimitsu Onishi's article citing various African commentators claiming that stepped-up anti-gay legislation in a number of African countries is "blowback" for U.S. support of LGBT rights in Africa. I did so because so much that I heard the African voices cited by Onishi saying sounded precisely like what I remember white Southern "liberals" saying during the period of the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S.

"We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers." Bayard Rustin, Quaker gay activist

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About Me

I'm a theologian who writes about the interplay of belief and culture. My husband Steve (also a theologian) and I are now in our 47th year together. Though the church has discarded us (and here, here, here, and here) because we insist on being truthful about our shared life, we continue to celebrate the amazing grace we find in our journey together and love for each other.
We live in hope; we remain on pilgrimage....
A note about my educational background: I have a Ph.D. and M.A. in theology from Univ. of St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology; an M.A. in English from Tulane Univ.; and a B.A. in English from Loyola, New Orleans.